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5 Ways To Build Trust
5 Ways To Build Trust
5 Ways To Build Trust
BUSINESS AND IT
Most organizational dysfunction is the symptom of a greater problem:
Business-IT trust has broken down. Here’s how smart CIOs repair those
rifts — or foster trust from the get-go.
By Minda Zetlin, contributing writer, CIO Feb 24, 2021 2:00 am PST
You’re not invited to strategic meetings. When you make recommendations, business
leaders seek second opinions from consultants, their peers, or the latest magazine
article. Users insist they have to have their chosen brand of software because they’re
sure your standardized apps won’t meet their needs. Meanwhile, your IT team
complains about the requests they get, and wants your permission to refuse or ignore
them.
It’s not a pretty picture, but all these familiar frustrations are symptoms of the same
problem: Trust has broken down between IT and the business.
“The moment you have a situation where there is pressure, that’s when trust issues can
start,” says Krishna Tammana, CTO of data integration company Talend. “Why does
this happen? It is the amount of demand on IT, and the budgets of IT are never
correlated. I’ve never seen a situation where IT had enough budget for the number of
things the business wanted.”
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Krishna Tammana, CTO, Talend
At the same time, some IT departments’ tendency to keep failures and uncertainties to
themselves can exacerbate the problem. “The root cause for trust is transparency,”
Tammana says. “When business leaders see that IT is trying to help the business, and
is willing to acknowledge its own strengths and weaknesses, the relationship is very
trusting and very solid. The moment any of these falls off, everything becomes very
tense.”
Maybe you’re seeing symptoms of business-IT mistrust in your own organization, or
maybe you just want to make sure you never do. Either way, how can you increase trust
across the business-IT divide? Here’s what smart CIOs recommend.
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1 TELL IT LIKE IT IS — EVEN TO YOURSELF
“I think people in IT need to have better candor,” says John Roman, Jr., CIO at CPA
and consulting firm The Bonadio Group in Rochester, N.Y. “We’re in the service
business. The customer comes first. We want everybody to like us. I think in our
motivation to please, we sometimes overcommit and under-deliver. If you start to do
that consistently, you break the trust.”
Roman says he himself has made the mistake of underestimating how long a job would
take. “I think sometimes there’s a tendency to provide a response to a question when
you don’t have all the information. I’ve learned that before I say, ‘Yes, we can do it by
such-and-such a time,’ I’ll go to the person on my team and say, ‘We need to get this
done by tomorrow. Can it be done?’”
IT leaders should never be afraid to ask for help, or to admit that they don’t know
something, adds Don Logan, CIO at accounting and consulting firm Friedman LLP in
New York City.
“When you get to a level of executive management where you’re responsible for many
people, at that point you may have 15 or 20 years behind you,” he says. “You kind of
build an ego. You think you’re invincible, you’re the expert, and you know everything.
And you don’t know what you don’t know.”
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Logan, who says he’s made this mistake himself, calls it “the ego trap.” And, he says,
“It hurts you and ultimately the business you’re working for and the people you’re
working with.”
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about the goals and strategies of the organization, frame every comment in those terms.
Make it clear that you understand what kinds of outcomes matter and how those
outcomes are going right now.”
When you’re talking to an executive, you should know what the three most important
metrics are to that person, both operational metrics and financial metrics, he adds.
“What’s the status of those metrics right now? What’s the trendline on them? And what
can I do to make those numbers pop in the right direction?”
Gartner
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To jump-start the process of building trust between IT employees and their business
contacts, Tammana says he “cross-pollinates” his team by having team members work
on the business side for a time. “Depending on the job, I’ve had them actually go and
function as a business user,” he says. “They learn what it’s like and what the problems
are, and they come back with a tremendous amount of empathy for what the business
is dealing with.”
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Hilgendorf would never consider complaining about one of his peers to his team. When
his team members complain about their business contacts, he pushes back. “I say, ‘You
got to look at this from their perspective. What do you understand that you don’t feel
they understand? Have you asked? Have you tried to understand where they’re coming
from and why? Or have you just made assumptions?’”
If you don’t ask these sorts of questions, you’re giving your employees permission not
to have the difficult conversations they need to have, he explains.
These days, Hilgendorf hears a lot fewer of these gripes. “They know that if they
complain up, they’re just going to get guided in the direction to go have a conversation
again,” he says. “Try to understand where that person is coming from and why, and
then solve the problem. So they don’t even ask at this point because they know what
the response is going to be. And that has made all the difference.”
The high degree of trust between business and IT leaders at Fox turned out to be a huge
asset in 2020. As the pandemic decimated the travel industry, particularly business
travel, the company saw its revenues plummet by 90% in March 2020 and they have
not recovered since. Layoffs were the inevitable result.
Even so, Hilgendorf says, “With the impact of COVID-19 on the travel industry, we’ve
seen trust actually grow between technology and our business units. Crisis can have
two different effects on a culture. It can either lead to fear and aggression as people try
to one-up each other, or it can lead to a tighter bond that we’re in this together and we
need to rely on each other even more than before.”